My grip on the glass went white-knuckle for a beat, then I set it down hard enough to rattle the ice. “You’re seeing ghosts.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But I’ve seen you do your job for ten years, and I’ve never seen you like this.”
I stood and walked to the window, arms crossed, trying to line up my thoughts against the edge of the horizon. Behind me, I heard her uncork the tension with another pour.
I said, “He’s not what you think.”
Jenna snorted. “No one ever is. But that’s not the problem.”
I turned, ready for a fight. “Then what is?”
She rose, glass in hand, and paced around the coffee table. “The problem, Catherine, is that you’re risking everything for the one type of man your family warned you about.”
I bristled. “Don’t psychoanalyze me, Counselor.”
“I’m not. I’m warning you.” Jenna’s voice softened, but the heat in it was all anger, all history. “He’s not safe. He’s not…”
“You?” I finished for her, voice low and mean. “He’s not a lawyer, not respectable, not a smart career move. That it?”
Jenna’s jaw flexed, and her mouth pressed in a line. “I just thought you were smarter than this.”
I moved to the sideboard, pretending to organize mail, anything to keep from exploding. “I am smart. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
She closed the space between us, her body close enough that I could feel the static charging up my skin. “Then prove it. Cut him loose. Transfer the next case. Show me you still know the difference between the job and the story you tell yourself about the job.”
She placed a hand against my cheek and pressed her lips against mine. I considered sliding my hand between her legs, but thought we needed to get back to the Seneca conversation.
I let the mask drop, just for a second. “I don’t have to prove anything to you.”
Jenna shook her head and laughed bitterly. “You don’t have to, no. But you want to.”
“You’re jealous.”
She met my eyes, and for the first time, I saw the raw edge under the lawyer’s mask. “Maybe. Maybe I liked thinking I was the only one who got under your skin.” She smirked, and I knew what was coming. “The only one to get between your legs.”
“Is that what you want?” I asked, not looking up. “Me to pretend none of it ever happened?”
“No,” she said, voice hoarse. “I just want you to be honest with me, Catherine. That’s all I ever wanted.”
I looked up, and she was already at the door, shrugging on her blazer with the efficiency of someone preparing for battle. She gathered her folder, but when she reached for the bottle, her hand faltered, knocking a stack of legal briefs across the table. She left them there, scattered and bent, and walked out without another word.
I forced myself to move. Poured the last of the bottle into my glass, then filled another to the rim just for spite. I shuffled to the window and watched as Jenna’s silver coupe peeled off the curb, tires spitting grit, tail lights screaming red against the bruised sky. Her car reached the end of the block before the clouds let loose, and the whole world turned the color of an old bruise.
I slumped onto the couch, glass in hand, the legal briefs she’d dropped spread out like a map of everything we’d lost. My hands shook, just a little, as the wine made rings on the wood where I had set it down and picked it up again.
I sat there until the sun was gone and the desert darkness swallowed up the city, leaving only the drone of far-off traffic and the distant rumble of thunder. For the first time in years, I didn’t know what tomorrow would look like.
Jenna and I were only supposed to be a fling.
When Jenna and I first collided, because falling in love with her never felt like a smooth descent, she’d arrived in New Mexico as a fixer. A big city lawyer with a glittering resume, already the star of every panel, the woman you called when you needed a lost cause converted into prime rib. At least, that was the resume. Off paper, she had the emotional range of a crime scene and the self-preservation instincts of a cornered animal. The wildness of her was what drew me first. The way she’d spar with a courtroom and then chain-smoke in the parking lot, pupils blown wide from the thrill of near professional suicide.
The first time we fucked, I was fresh off a smoke myself, my blouse rumpled from a motion hearing, and my thighs still trembling with the aftershock of her closing argument. We’d gone back to my place because it was the only one without a roommate, and because Jenna liked the way my kitchen knives were arranged in order of probability. Two drinks in, she’dcornered me against the sink and smuggled her hands under my shirt before I had even formulated a half-decent objection.
She was strong, the kind of strong that made you forget she was smaller than most of her competition. She spoke quickly and moved even faster, always one step ahead, and that night was no exception. She had my shirt undone and my spine pressed to the subway tile before she even bothered to ask what I wanted. She always did it like that: assumed you were already hers, and then set out to prove it.
I let her. That was the dirty secret.
That night ended with a shattered glass, a kitchen stool upended, and a bruise on my hip that I tried to remember as an accident. I’d awoken to her blowing smoke rings at my ceiling, wearing nothing but the sheet and that same feral, predatory smirk.
